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Oscar Is Sometimes a Grouch

By VINCENT CANBY

Published: February 25, 1990

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciencesis not, as it sometimes seems, a monolithic tyranny of middlebrow opinion. The 1989 Oscar nominations give the lie to all that.

It is, instead, a loose confederation of guilds that may be medieval in the way they guard their arcane secrets (sometimes from one another) but all-American when it comes to boosterism. The academy members are specialists who go their own ways. They are artists, craftsmen and technicians who, at this time of year, are briefly united in the impulse to do the right thing.

With the exception of the best-picture nominees, on which the entire academy electorate votes, the nominations in each category are decided by the members of that guild, or by special committees. (The entire membership then votes in all the categories for the Oscars.) This separation of interests is something one has to remember when the Oscar nominations are announced.

The only generalization that can be be made is that the academy's members mean well. They are remarkably tolerant toward human frailties. They can accommodate fiscal folly. They admire a certain amount of greed, and they always have a soft spot in their hearts for the congenitally second-rate.

Yet their patience threshold is not high. They don't tolerate big mouths, especially the big mouths of outsiders.

When Orson Welles first went to Hollywood with the announced intention of showing the natives how to make movies, he was treated as a dangerous prodigy. He was initially feted, but not until he had been cut down to size by box-office failure was he accepted as one of the community.

This year the big-mouth theory seems to be the easiest (though not the only) way to explain why Spike Lee and Michael Moore were so minimally treated in the nominations. Minimally? In the case of Mr. Moore's ''Roger and Me,'' it was a complete shutout.

''Roger and Me'' would appear to have had everything going for it to win a nomination as the best documentary feature of the year. It's about a little guy (the portly Mr. Moore, figuratively speaking) attacking the system (General Motors) in the populist tradition of Frank Capra's fictional heroes (Mr. Deeds and Mr. Smith).

The film's provenance is impeccable. It's a first feature by an unknown film maker and was produced for a song (which appeals to the sentimental bookkeeper vote). It was then acquired for distribution by a major company of Old Hollywood roots, Warner Brothers, which reportedly paid Mr. Moore $3 million for the honor. This is sure-fire rags-to-riches stuff.

To top it off, the movie has been doing great business and seems well on its way to becoming one of the biggest-grossing documentary films ever released in this country. The box office doesn't lie. What went wrong? Enter the big-mouth theory.

Mr. Moore talked. He began talking when ''Roger and Me'' was shown at the New York Film Festival last September, and he hasn't stopped talking since. Among other things, he admitted (to Harlan Jacobson in a Film Comment interview) that in putting the film together, he had allowed the audience to believe that certain events happened in a chronological sequence that was not, strictly speaking, true.

The point, said Mr. Moore, was not to record dreary history but to give an accurate portrait of a city (Flint, Mich.) in the throes of an economic depression caused by corporate neglect. He was simply exercising literary license.

This would seem to be something that could be understood in Hollywood where, in the occasional film, the sun has set in the East and risen in the West. It might have been understood again if Mr. Moore, in his public statements, hadn't characterized himself as such a relentlessly abrasive personality. Humble is not his style.

What's worse, his lack of humility is attached to a film that, unlike ''Mr. Deeds Goes to Town'' and ''Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,'' does not have a happy ending. The only little guy who triumphs in ''Roger and Me'' is Mr. Moore. The picture he draws of Flint is cautionary. He's warning about the fire next time, which, according to the movie, is here and now.

For all of the laughter it evokes, ''Roger and Me'' is not only angry but it is also full of doom.

So, too, is ''Do the Right Thing,'' in which the fire is made manifest. At the climax of the film, Sal's Famous Pizzeria is burned to the ground in one of the most bitter racial confrontations ever seen in an American movie.

Though ''Do the Right Thing'' is not mainstream Hollywood, its provenance is. It was produced and distributed by Universal Pictures, which seems to have supported it throughout its release as carefully as any movie maker could ask. The film has done well, though it was not one of the year's top moneymakers.

''Do the Right Thing'' would have seemed to be a shoo-in as a nominee for best picture and best director. Its director, one of the most aggressively talented young film makers to appear in years, is black in an industry still dominated by whites. Hollywood likes to encourage new talent and to identify itself as an equal opportunity appreciator.